* I apologize for the incoming wall of text, and the fact that this is off-topic, but I also felt that this was the most appropriate place to post this.
Given the constant references to EnigmaticAxiom's work as some sort of standard, I thought I'd take a shot at providing some sort of visible metric of its accuracy for comparison purposes. It seems to be commonly held that if the English is fine, and as much care as Enigmatic took is taken, then the translation should be more or less accurate. I want to dispute that claim.
I've taken the epilogue from Madan v1 for comparison and translated it myself, though admittedly from Chinese. That notwithstanding, as the official translation, it should be fairly reliable. You can find the
comparison of our two translations here.
As should be fairly obvious, while the MTL'd text is fairly accurate, there's still a lot missing. Sure, much of it is still there, but the devil is in the details. Consider, for example, when a series we fans love is adapted into an anime that "butchers" it. Again, much of the content is the same, but when all those small things that make up the series we love are gone, it's aggravating, is it not? When translating, it's almost a given that some things will be lost in translation, but do we not owe it to the series we love to at least
try to preserve the feel of things? Authors agonize over all these little details. Writing is an extremely difficult task, and getting published even more so. They spend countless hours working on these novels that we so enjoy, and do we not owe them at least the effort of
attempting to match that effort with effort of our own? When you MTL something, you don't even do that much.
Finally, in an admittedly more emotional and personal appeal, do readers not realize the disrespect and disdain they show translators when they suggest that an edited machine translation can reproduce "most" of what a translator does? When you suggest that a pure machine translation is of value - even an edited one - what you are in effect saying is, "Sure, you may have spent years learning a new language, and countless hours crafting a translation, but look, I can do 80% of what you do in a fraction of the time and with far less effort!" Or in other words, "What a waste of time and effort."
"There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible and wrong." H.L. Mencken (1971)
I'd even say that glossed over MTLs are worse because they discourage "real" TLs even more to do a right TL for the stuff.
, just goes to show how awesome you guys are).
